walker tracker daily step count

May 2005

Molecular [1]

Please read:

Lately, I’ve been organizing my notes and stuff; it’s great to get it under control. I’m historically really poor at recording which books I read, storing notes in any retrievable way, and identifying books I’d like to read in the future. I don’t have a really good solution yet, but I’m getting there. One side effect of the above is that reading doesn’t seem as risky a proposition any more, which means that I’m doing a lot more of it. The interesting parts of this process are identifying what I sense are the atomic units of dead-tree knowledge, and coming up with a way for documenting and referring to those units. Does that make sense? Sweet, sweet del.icio.us currently provides the best solution for handling (read: building context for) references to web stuff; the challenge is in devising a way to fake it if you’re in the library, or holding a library book you can’t deface.

Ultimately, I’d like to be able to approach a snippet from a book, a reference to a page or section of a book, an e-mail conversation, an IM transcript, a web link, or a “document” in an approximately equal fashion. Memetic.

Macintosh

Mac OS 10.4 Tiger is out, and everybody has something to say. Daring Fireball’s “Tiger Details” makes the following elegiac remarks:

While booting, Tiger no longer displays a series of vaguely-informative status messages describing which subsystems are launching. All you see during the Tiger boot sequence: the gray Apple logo screen, then the spinner under the Apple logo, then a progress bar with the text, “Starting Mac OS X”. Next up is the Login panel.

Gone, therefore, is the phrase “Welcome to Macintosh”, which I believe (as does Nat Irons, who submitted this observation) was the last remaining high-profile usage of “Macintosh” by Apple. “Mac” is used all over the place – PowerMac, iMac, eMac, Mac OS X, .Mac — but the full “Macintosh” has apparently been placed on the same shelf as the six-color Apple logo.

This is what it looked like, twenty years ago:

The Macintosh Finder splash -- why 1984 won't be like 1984